IROS 2011 Tutorial: Motion Planning for Real Robots

IROS 2011 Tutorial: Motion Planning for Real Robots

Format: Full day tutorial

Date: Sunday, September 25, 2011

Registration

If you are interested in attending this tutorial, please provide us some more information about you using this form. Filling this form will help us plan the tutorial better. Please note that you will still have to register separately on the conference website for this tutorial when you register for the conference itself.

Abstract

This full-day tutorial will teach both novice and experienced participants how to setup, configure and use motion planning on a real robot. Novice users can expect to learn how to set up, configure and execute the perceptual, kinematic, planning and execution components required for motion planning on an advanced multiple degree of freedom robot. Expert users will be able to explore the motion planners in more details, focusing on how they can be reconfigured for particular tasks. The tutorial will be based on a set of tools within the OMPL (Open Motion Planning Library) and ROS (Robot Operating System) software. The participants will have access to simulated environments and real robots (the Willow Garage PR2 robots) for a hands-on experience in using motion planning with real robots. The tutorial will conclude with an examination of case studies based on suggestions from the participants and organizers, highlighting how the motion planners can be configured for particular robots or motion planning scenarios.

Motivation and objectives

Motion planning is easy to understand, yet state-of-the-art algorithms to solve motion planning problems in a general fashion can be hard to implement. Furthermore, integrating motion planning algorithms in a bigger software system targeted at specific robots is also challenging. The OMPL library implements many sampling-based algorithms and makes it easy to integrate with larger software systems and tailor to specific systems. ROS provides a very rich software infrastructure with perception, kinematics and execution components that can be integrated with planning to create a complete motion planning and execution pipeline. The tutorial aims to provide a high-level description of the motion planning algorithms in OMPL coupled with implementation level details on configuring motion planners on real robots. The tutorial will provide plenty of opportunity for participants to get hands-on experience with solving motion planning problems in real-world environments, both in simulation and on the robot using real sensor data. After the tutorial participants should be able to:

write code to define a configuration space and the control space (if applicable) for a robotic system of interest

define motion planning queries and solve them with a planning algorithm

visualize the results

use the sensor data and environment models that accessible through various ROS interfaces for motion planning

Primary/secondary audience

We are primarily targeting participants who would like to learn to implement motion planners on real robots using realtime sensing. Some familiarity with ROS is desired but not essential. This will be a hands-on tutorial, so programming experience in C++/Python is desired. A secondary audience is researchers in motion planning who would like to build on the tools and components available in OMPL and ROS to create more advanced motion planners. This tutorial will also be of interest to educators wanting to use a stable, well-featured software tool for teaching motion planning.

If you are planning on bringing a laptop with Ubuntu to our tutorial it would really help us out if you could do a couple things while you are all connected to your fast home/school/work internet connections. If you aren’t bringing a laptop or don’t have access to a fast connection we will have some internet access at the tutorial site but it may take you a while to get up-to-date, giving you less time to learn about motion planning. We will have several workstations available but we’re expecting a bunch of folks and you will maximize your hands-on time by bringing a pre-installed laptop.

First, get up-to-date debians for electric from ros.org. Even if you have recently installed electric there are new packages for arm-navigation as of this morning and you definitely want the latest and greatest bug fixes. If you haven’t installed electric at all then follow the instructions here: http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Installation/Ubuntu. The meta-package you should install and/or update for the tutorial is ros-electric-pr2-desktop - this will give you everything you need for the tutorial and to interface to the PR2s we’ll have at the tutorial. Once you’ve got things setup these two commands should do the trick:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-electric-pr2-desktop

Next, download the tutorial repository - we’ve been building up some resources that will make the practical portion of the tutorial more interesting. You can download the repo using this command:

You should get two windows - a Qt application showing a cool Turtle wizard with a bionic arm and a rviz window showing the PR2. If you get both of these windows you can have confidence that you are ready for a productive day Sunday!

Everyone travel safely and we’re excited to meet you. If you have questions you are welcome to contact E. Gil Jones (gjones/AT/willowgarage.com) or Mark Moll (mmoll/AT/rice.edu).